It was inevitable that Pushkin, with his massive experience of
literature and his catholic taste in genres, would turn to the
stage. By his mid-twenties he had already found fame with the
reading public, who waited with keen interest for each new work. He
had burst upon the literary scene at the age of twenty, in the year
1820, with the publication of Ruslan i
Liudmila [Ruslan and Lyudmila], a long
mock-epic narrative of astonishing poetic fluency and
inventiveness, following this up by a series of more serious,
narrative poems in the Byronic manner, culminating in
Tsygany [The Gypsies,
1824]. In full flow as a lyric poet, in 1823 he had made a start on
his l…

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